Don't Judge a Picture by its... Picture.

I'm a total newbie to the world of Facebook and know my way around there about as well as I knew the difference between Norwalk and Norway on the 405 Freeway at the age of sixteen (a story for another time...). Seriously, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm still not exactly sure what purpose it serves. I just knew that if I ever wanted to see Nikki's pictures of Africa in this lifetime I was going to have to sign up on Facebook. So please do not expect me to send you flair or to play you a game of scrabble because I'm just getting comfortable with the idea that I'm actually allowed to write on my walls.

However, I was able to add a picture of myself last week, a technological achievement of cosmic proportions. Now, before you get all hot under the collar and pipe up about how it's not even a REMOTELY accurate depiction of the Me that you know (and have grown to love?) with its post-modern, overexposed, off-centered, mysterious three-quarter turned profile, and muted earthy color palette reminiscient of an Andrew Wyeth painting, I'd like you all to know that the fact that I even had a usable picture to upload is a miracle of nature.

As you may have guessed by now, I'm a little neurotic about protecting my children's identities on the internet. There are no shortage of lunatics out there and while I may not be able to shelter them from my frozen meal disasters or the angry female folk rock music of the 90's that I just can't seem to break free from, I can limit their exposure on the internet. (Never mind the obscene amount of embarrassing details I reveal about them in my blog that they will never forgive me for which is why I'm not pushing the whole "reading" thing with Lil' Miss.) The downside is that most family pictures, some really cute ones in Hawaii I might add, cannot be used. So, do you have any idea how hard it is to find a decent picture of myself, one that does NOT include braces or a pitiful version of the "Rachel" haircut, or the extra Freshman Fifteen that stayed with me way past my college graduation day?

Add to this the fact that I've been the designated family photographer since day one. So while we have eight million pictures of Baby Dude, Lil' Miss, Baby Dude and Lil' Miss, Baby Dude, Lil' Miss and Honk, there are a total of three, I repeat THREE pictures taken of me over the last four years. Two of the three pictures are non-options. They're the ones where I'm sprawled like a whale across a hospital bed in the maternity ward and I haven't slept in days or put on makeup and my body is still a mutant version of itself and I'm surrounded by machines and IV tubes hanging down around me like seaweed. It's fair to say that these photos would probably not bring about the confirmation of too many new friends. At least the types of friends I'm used to making.

So that left me with option number three, a family picture taken from a substantial distance by Nana six months ago at Disneyland. We were standing in front of the castle and right as we were all about to smile the heck out of ourselves, we heard the cries of a frantic mother looking for her lost daughter. My head snapped in her direction just as Nana snapped the picture. I was so caught up in that harrowing moment that I actually didn't even remember taking this picture until I found it on my camera much later. I immediately raced over to the mother, grabbed her by the shoulders, looked her square in the eyes and said, "Honey, nobody knows your daughter, so stop yelling her name. What is she WEARING?" After she tells me I cup my hands around my mouth and start bellowing right in the middle of the castle plaza like a squire announcing the king's orders, "Listen up! We've got a lost girl, about eight years old, blond hair, wearing a hot pink dress." Within three minutes, the little girl, albeit shaken and crying, was reunited with her mother. Now I realize that many people were looking for her, so I'm not going to take full credit for that Happily Ever After. Just partial credit, maybe seventy-five percent. Let's just say that I've never been more proud of my psychotic fear of child abduction, a gripping terror that led me to devise this remarkable (admit it, you're impressed) recovery plan.

And this, my skeptical neysayers, is why after blowing up my Facebook picture to its Greatest Magnified Capability (GMC? New photography term I've just coined, Nikki?) and steering it over as far away as possible from the head of my pure and innocent daughter who was sitting in my lap and whose image will not be shown on the internet until she is old enough to launch that WipGwoss line she's been trying out, you only see a hazy picture of my head in the corner looking away in another direction. Now don't you feel bad for calling me a pretentious avangardist?

So while my picture may very well be one of the greatest hoaxes of the twenty-first century, it's not without good reason. Besides, how many people can say that they bust a gut cracking up at themselves every time they open their Facebook profile? And one of these days I might be able to stop laughing long enough to figure out how to return that message you sent me three weeks ago.